


Lie | Low

by christchex



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Character self reflection, M/M, immediately following PoA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:54:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26280703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/christchex/pseuds/christchex
Summary: One night of revelations couldn’t undo twelve years of bitterness and regret.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Kudos: 15





	Lie | Low

**Author's Note:**

> I have no clue what this is, beyond I'm in a _mood_ and having inexplicable feelings about Sirius and Remus about 10 years after the last time I had feelings about them. Anyway, this exists now, so thank you to anyone who actually reads it.
> 
> Also, JKR wrote something I very much enjoyed but she is also trash who imbued her work with her awful opinions and hateful biases. I think that just needs to be said. Ok.
> 
> Enjoy.
> 
> EDIT: turns out I was in the middle of a manic episode and I really should have realized it when I posted this and not a few days later. Oh well. Enjoy a mania-fulled... something...

The forest was silent, after it all. The small creatures still hid in fear while the centaurs kept to themselves. It was dark, barely, with dawn just barely creeping in and the dirt beneath him was cold. It had been a long time since he was that cold.

No. That wasn’t right.

It had been that long since he’d been even a little bit warm, that soul encompassing warmth that maybe wasn’t a physical thing but was actually hope.

The morning brought back the cold, bone deep and lingering.

He was innocent. Innocent.

Remus let his head fall back, hair in the dirt and barely making an impact on his already grime-covered head.

Innocent.

He curled up in the underbrush and then didn’t move for a very long time.

-

There was no relief as the castle grew smaller in the distance. There was very little beyond the wind whipping at his too long, tangled hair, the burn of it against his face. He could have hidden it in the hippogriff’s neck but he didn’t. He didn’t do much of anything. It was so close. Still so close.

That was the thing, they lingered. The dementors feed and feed and feed and there was never a reprieve. It was just the endless blackhole of memories, of regrets, of anger and loathing and the knowledge that he deserved it all.

The was no relief. How could he feel it, when they still nipped at his heels? How could he feel anything when the rat ran into the night and with him went all his barely grasped for dreams.

He had Remus back. That was something. He had Harry too, in a distant way.

That would have to do.

-

One day, it wouldn’t hurt so much to walk away. It wouldn’t hurt to leave Hogwarts and the home he had carved for himself there. One day it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe the next time he left, it wouldn’t be with a heavy heart. It hurt this time, with Sirius on the run and Harry on his way back to a home that didn’t love him.

It had hurt after graduation, with the knowledge of how hard his life would be and the pain of reality that hit them before they ever left the castle walls. The war had hit them all, too young to do anything but fight, barely experienced enough to match the wizard throwing curses at them.

It had hurt to say goodbye to Sirius, to not see him every day, not hold him.

He shouldn’t have been surprised when he showed up at Remus’ tiny flat, but somehow it did.

Sirius Black had never met a fight he didn’t love and the world had plenty of fights and yet the one he chose was Remus. He showed up and said that’s not how we end.

And so, it wasn’t. They didn’t end. They didn’t end that year or the next. They stayed by each other’s side and they grew tight lipped and they aged beyond all reason in the space of a few months, but they never left each other’s side for long.

Not until a flash of green light, the death of their family, and an explosion that left just enough witnesses.

-

Sirius and the hippogriff stopped eventually. Sirius didn’t know where, he wasn’t aware of much. He knew it was far enough south that the choppy waters didn’t remind him of Azkaban. They were still, wherever they were. Still and silent and black, with an unknown depth that could probably kill even without the undertow of the waters he was used to.

Sirius felt like he could relate, for once in his life. He wasn’t a storm, not any more. Or, if he was, he was a storm that had long run its course, but with a danger that laid in the aftermath.

These were his thoughts now, nonsense. This was what he was like now, dangerous in a way even his reckless youth could never produce.

It had been simple, though, to get Remus to believe him. So very simple that Sirius himself still couldn’t believe it. After twelve years, all it took was some words, a name on a map?

Remus was always too smart for him, for all of them really, for all that they received the same scores in school.

He leaned his head against the cave wall where they hid for the day. He closed his eyes and did not sleep.

-

The bed at the cottage was lumpy. It had never bothered him before, wasn’t truly bothering him now to be honest, but it was a far cry from the four-poster bed he had gotten used to once, again. It was more like the too small mattress they had shared in the shitty flat that Sirius loved because it had been punk and that Remus loved because it was the perfect balance of affordable and not complete trash.

There were a lot of memories, ones he had managed to ignore for twelve years that had come rushing back despite everything he tried.

Somehow, over the course of barely even an hour, he had managed to convince himself that it would end well, they would clear Sirius name and they would somehow work their way through over a decade of trauma and they would take Harry and end up back at this very cottage. Somehow, he had convinced himself there would be a fire in the hearth and a large black dog, well-groomed and with meat on its bones, and he and Harry reading by the light.

He hadn’t been an optimist before. He wasn’t sure how he managed to turn into one after thirty-odd years.

He closed his eyes and tried not to think that he was still a fool. He had never been one of those before either. He had always been a liar though, at least to himself, so maybe those things weren’t entirely true.

-

Once Sirius hated the joke James would make every time he would sulk- a black mood, get it Padfoot?- and now he laughs to himself, hysterical. A black mood indeed, as he tried to commit the murder he was charged for, as he accidentally set a madman free.

He wasn’t entirely sure if he meant Peter or himself.

He laughed though, as the sun started to fall and the hippogriff returned from it’s hunting. It dropped a hare in his lap. Sirius did not hesitate. He turned back into a dog and ate.

This wasn’t even close to his lowest.

-

Remus watched the moon rise.

Nothing in his blood sang. He didn’t feel a yearning. Whatever they said about the call of the moon, it was a lie.

It had never been the moon that called to him.

There were times, in the last twelve years, where Remus cursed the part of him that ached for a missing part. There were times where Remus thought about tearing at his skin, the skin that yearned for a touch that would never come again.

It was never the moon that Remus felt a pull towards. Even the wolf he became didn’t feel it. No, he shifted and his body tore itself apart and rebuilt itself into leaner muscle and thick fur, but the call remained. He cursed himself for falling in love with someone who was so goddamn good at lying. He always had been, lying about his feelings, his fears, his bravado so well practiced that everyone, himself included, had never known it wasn’t real. The madness wasn’t a lie. The crimes were, but they weren’t even Sirius lies. It wasn’t the first time though, that someone else’s lie, trick, whatever you wanted to call it, hurt him more than it hurt the other.

Twelve years Remus mourned so much. He mourned his family, found and formed and lost. He mourned the love he thought he had. He mourned the him that had existed once, happy and as whole as he got. He mourned the life they had, the one that had already started to fall apart from the silence and the necessary lies and the orders that came to both of them. The war was killing them all, in a way. It was just more dramatic for some than for others.

Really, Remus shouldn’t have been surprised that, out of all of them, Sirius’ drama trumped everyone else’s. He was. Somehow, he was always surprised by Sirius.

-

The hippogriff flew by night, smarter and saner than the man riding his back. As far as Sirius was aware, they were flying in circles, because days passed and yet they hadn’t reached the sea, hadn’t traveled over water to different lands. Stretched of green hills, areas of jagged gray rocks, that twice cursed still black lake that made Sirius think about too many things, like looking into a mirror of his inner turmoil, and wasn’t that a thought that would put even his dramatic teenage ass to shame.

Sirius was starting to feel a little more like himself, whatever that was worth.

They flew, the wind on face burning as it hit his already chapped skin. He was grateful for the warmth at his front as the cold air around him swirled.

He didn’t know how much longer he could stay like this, up in the air and in circles with nowhere to go.

“Safe,” he croaked to the hippogriff. “We need to find somewhere safe.”

Sirius had no idea if that worked, for all that they were clever creatures, but the animal straightened from its curving arc and flew steady on until morning.

-

The thump in Remus’ yard at just past daybreak was a shock and the least surprising thing he could have imagined.

For almost twenty years, Sirius Black had been surprising him, despite how much Remus should have known better. Yet here, in a cottage Sirius had never seen, only days after finding out that he was innocent, with Sirius and Buckbeak the hippogriff trampling his flowers yet saving his vegetables.

None of them looked good, he knew, but he didn’t expect to see the weight on Sirius’ shoulders. It hadn’t been there a few days ago, he was too manic for that. Remus couldn’t imagine what Sirius could see on his face, if he saw every last change from the bright young thing he once was, if he could see the gray in his hair and the fresh scabs along the back of his neck to his cheek- the result of a night curled up on a forest floor as a human rather than a wolf.

They looked so old. They weren’t that old. It was amazing what grief and anger and heartbreak could do to a person.

“Better come inside,” he said. Buckbeak made no noise as he took off towards the trees in the distance.

He left the door open as he walked into the kitchen.

-

They spent most of their time in silence. Sirius ate as a human for the first time in longer than he’d care to admit. Remus tried not to stare, tried not to try to reconcile the man in front of him with the man he once knew every inch of.

One night of revelations could not make up for the distance, for the hurt, for the anger, for the years that another’s betrayal carved between them.

Remus sipped his tea and let the silence lie light and easy around. It wasn’t oppressive. It just was. There was too much to say that couldn’t be uttered, so silence would do. Remus rose from the chair as Sirius finished his meal. He left the kitchen and returned with a towel. Sirius took it, hand barely a ghost of a touch on Remus’, and walked in the direction Remus had pointed.

Clothes sat on the vanity as Sirius tried to wash off, gray falling from his hair and his body, seemingly a lifetime of grime with even more rubbed into his scalp, into the beds of his nails, into ever tear in his soul.

Sirius curled up on the loveseat, now four-legged and barely wet. Remus draped a knit blanket over him. The waning moon’s light couldn’t be seen from the window. They both preferred it that way.

-

It was barely two days before Sirius spoke.

“I can’t stay here,” he said over breakfast.

“I know,” Remus replied.

They didn’t avoid each other’s eyes. Their voices did not hold anger or regret, just the knowledge that Sirius spoke the truth. He couldn’t stay here, for practical reasons or for emotional reasons it didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay.

“I don’t know when I’ll get to see you again,” Sirius said. He broke eye contact only to take a sip of water.

“It dangerous for you to say in the country,” Remus agreed. Sirius nodded and took another sip of water. “And I think, that if you stay here, there won’t be much left of us at the end.” Sirius’ eyes cut back to him. “I haven’t been okay all these years Sirius,” Remus admitted. “I’ve been living and I’ve had times where I was even happy, but I can’t tell you I’m okay Sirius. And there’s no way that you are either.”

“We were always good at finding the sore spot,” Sirius admitted. “I know it’s not the time to say it, but all you can do in that place is think and regret, and I’ve thought about it so much.”

“Sirius don’t-“

“It wasn’t the war that tore us apart Remus.”

Remus closed his eyes.

“You’re right.”

“Neither one of us was okay, but we pushed anyway.”

“What else could we do?”

“Nothing, then. But now?”

Remus opened his eyes. For all that Sirius words were sane- more than sane, they were maybe the most coherent, most aware Sirius had ever been about _them_ \- his demeanor was not. His eyes were glassy and his breathing was harsh. He was moments aware from panic, Remus could see it clearly, saw it the same as he used to.

“Neither one of us is okay,” Remus agreed. “I think I can be.”

Sirius’ grin was wide and not happy.

“I’m going to have to be.”

Remus nodded.

-

Sirius and Buckbeak the hippogriff left at sunset. They flew west, into the sun. Remus watched the moon creep into view.

One night of revelations didn’t do much to fix a broken heart, but at least it was finally a start.


End file.
